Intriguing finds in exhibt at Ursinus' Berman Museum

How do you reveal the richness of an art museum’s permanent collection in a way that’s still fun and accessible?

Eleven students in a brand-new “Inside an Art Museum Exhibition” museum studies course at Ursinus College have curated “A to Z: Highlighting the Berman Collection,” which is on view through Jan. 12 at the college’s Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art.

Celebrating a recent gift of more than 1,300 works of art to the Berman Museum’s collection, the students in professor Matthew Shoaf’s class located and researched more than two dozen works, which they have presented in alphabetical order by the artist’s last name.

Yes, they found one for the difficult letter X, but how about Q?

“The (artist’s) name is Francis Quick, and the picture was a portrait of Philip Berman,” said the museum’s director, Charles Stainback. Berman was an Ursinus alumnus that went on to become chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Berman Museum is named for him and his wife.

Some of the artists in “A to Z” are famous — Mary Cassatt, Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Man Ray — while other choices are more offbeat. For instance, Stainback said, B is for Betsy the chimpanzee, a 1950s animal celebrity from the Baltimore Zoo, whose finger paintings caught Berman’s eye when she appeared on national television.

The student who got the letter U came to Stainback and asked, “Would it be OK if I selected ‘unknown’?”

“She found three anonymous portraits of George Washington,” Stainback said, “and I said: ‘That’s brilliant’.”

“In some ways, (the exhibition) surpassed my expectations,” said Shoaf, a professor of art and art history at Ursinus.

Shoaf noted that a few of the students in the course are majoring in such studies as international relations, psychology and science.

“There’s definitely interest in having this happen again and again,” he said, adding that the college is developing a museum studies minor.

Also on viewIn the museum’s Upstairs Gallery through Dec. 22 is “Holly Trostle Brigham: Dis/Guise,” the first major museum exhibition for the Philadelphia artist, according to a press release from the college. The exhibition is comprised of 24 works, mostly life-sized watercolors.